Power Game

Introduction We Americans are a nation of game player . From friday nighet poker and sunday bingo to corporate rivalry and the nuclear arms race, Americans are preoccupied with winning and losing. Competition is our creed ; it is knit into the fabric of our national life . Sports and game shows are national pastimes. Either we play games ourselves or we take part vicariously. We swim , cycle, jog of play tennis--making it a game by matching ourselves against a rival, against par in in golf , of against the stopwatch when we hike or run . Five out of six Americans spend several hours a week viewing football,baseball ,boxing, bowling,or some other sport on television. One hundred million people tune into television game shows weekly --fory --three million to Wheel of Fortune. All over the world , people are playing at commerce on one hundred million sets of monopoly. Some people treat life as a game , to be won or lost , instead of seeing it in terms of a religious ethic of of some overarching system of values. In washington , senators and congressmen talk of politics as a game, and of themselves as "player." to be a player is to have power or influence on some issue. Not to be a player is to be out of the power loop and without influence. The ultimate game metaphous in government are the "war games" --not just he military exercise for fleets of ships or regiments of troops ,but those ghostly , computer--run scenarios that our policy makers and nuclear experts use to test their reflexes and our fefenses in a crisis ; human surival reduced to a game. So it seems only natural to look at how we are governed --the way Washington really works today --as a power game , not in some belittling sense , but as a way of understanding how goverment actually works and why it does not work better. For the game is sometimes glorious and why it does not work better. For the game is sometimes works and why it does not work better. For the game is sometimes glorious and uplifting , at other times aggravating or disenchanting . It obviously is a serious game with high stakes, one in which the winners and losers affect many lives---yours, mine, those of the people down the street , and of people all over the world. When I came to Washington in 1962 .